Donald Clarke: Ti sfido a camminare attraverso la sera della città di Dublino. Non crederai a quello che vedi

A lot of posters on here would benefit from reconsidering their hysterical bleating about crime.

>I was recently on Shaftesbury Avenue around 10pm and was struck by all the ladies scurrying into armoured cars after exiting Les Misérables lest cutpurses hop on their engagement rings. If night falls unexpectedly on the bars of Soho, revellers in earrings wait inside until dawn before making their way to the Fort Apache that is Leicester Square tube station.

haha

I was out last night. Dame st was hopping. It was like when I was young, except now I’m old.

Main difference is you can find a taxi without have to clip-clop towards home for an hour in stilettos.

I have no fear for my safety. Years of running and cycling have done away with any of that.

But I still hate walking through Dublin because it’s a shit hole. Homeless camps everywhere, junkies outside every shop, smell of piss all over the place.

I’ve never been scared for my life in the street in Dublin but I have been disappointed so often by the scumbag theater on show. When they clearly aren’t controlling even the very obvious, petty stuff that’s out in the open, a sense of shabbiness is created. The fact that the streets are also filled with tourists, revellers, and people enjoying their day/night out makes it worse really. It could be truly a fabulous city, but for the scum.

I regularly walk through the city at night and feel just as safe. If anything I feel more safe now that it’s busy again and building and lighting has increased along the docklands in particular.

Obviously Donald Clarke has never visited r/ireland

If he did he’d know Dublin is in “a third world country”, with “homeless camps everywhere” and (my favourite) “we can’t go out without fireworks launched in our faces”.

Worked in off Talbot st when I was in Dublin (left in 2017) and it was a mess then. Can only have gotten worse since. Was heading down the country one wknd and had to get the Luas out to Heuston and train to city west. It must have been benefits pay day as the city was flooded with scum drinking their carry outs in broad daylight in the streets. Every stop on the luas had at least one degenerate knocking about and then when I arrived at Heuston there was a group of about 10 locals, right outside the glass doors. Boxes of drink at their feet. Smoking away. Doing whatever they pleased. I was used to it but imagine tourists seeing that outside the country’s main train station. You wouldn’t see anything like that in any other capital in Europe. As much as people on here want to argue.

>Irish social media is similarly engulfed with paranoia about the desperate state of Dublin. People who seem to have forgotten what the capital was like in the 1980s, an era of deprivation and promiscuous heroin use, bemoan the absence of dancing bears and jolly cockle sellers. 

I genuinely think many of the people decrying Dublin’s descent into crime and social disorder _aren’t_ aware of just how much worse it was in previous decades. Either through age, not having lived there or selective memory. 

Similarly, I sometimes see people decry Dublin as being unsafe relative to other European cities, which immediately tells you they have limited experience living in major European cities.

Relative to either its past or comparable European cities, Dublin is very safe. Relative to the ideal or its state pre-Covid, perhaps less so. So while some complaints are in order, people should have a bit of perspective on what they’re complaining about.